The lust that dare not speak its name

Of course you know that other men have wandering eyes … but not your
lovely husband or boyfriend. Get real, says our anonymous writer, who argues
that like him all men are hard-wired to fantasise about other women

I'm sitting in a Starbucks, passing the time with another man – I'll call him Marcus – when two girls come in. Actually, they're not girls. They are women in their thirties. It's the middle of the day, but they are dressed in the modern urban manner – as if they were teenagers at a party. There's lots of flesh on show, and both are wearing expensive shoes with high heels. Nails, hair, eyes and teeth have all been taken care of. The women arrange themselves at a table and sip at their espressos.

The lust that dare not speak its name

This is when Marcus starts up. He lowers his head and meets my eyes. He gives me that male look of confidentiality. I know what he's going to say. I back away slightly. I'm married. I have kids. The image I have of myself is not like this.

But Marcus pays no heed. It's not him speaking – not exactly. It's testosterone. He's drunk on testosterone. 'Just look at that,' he says. The word 'that', with its flat tone of objectification, grates on me, like nails scraping a blackboard. Like I said, I'm married. My raw male soul has been feminised.

'Just … look … at … that.' I know what's coming next. I realise it might cause offence – to women, for obvious reasons, and to men, for less obvious ones. But I want to be frank about it; the way men fantasise about sex is one of our great taboos, as well as being much misunderstood.

Marcus continues. What follows sounds like a passage from a top-shelf magazine. It's like the text that goes alongside the pictures of the girl as she disrobes and makes herself pictorially ready for sex. Even though, as we all know, the girl in the picture never wants sex.

But Marcus, who is in his late thirties, and who works in the media, says these words with relish. He speaks in terms of what he would do to the women, maintaining the assumption that this is what they want him to do to them.

He fixes my eyes. This is a kind of male shorthand, a form of bonding. The rules are that, if you're a proper man, you think about sex, pretty much all the time, and that, furthermore, you are entirely tolerant of this quality in other men. On the surface, you may look like a gentleman. But inside, you're a goat.

'Wouldn't you?' says Marcus. I nod. I say something that, I hope, is not too insipid. Something about women getting more sexually voracious as they get older. This sets Marcus off again. Soon it will be my turn to spill the beans; my turn to repay the favour. For now, Marcus continues, taking in housewives and sex toys, rich women and their gardeners. He mentions, in passing, that he can't pass a woman in the street without imagining her naked – no, not naked: actually in the act of taking her clothes off.

Now it's my turn. I clear my throat. I mention a set of pictures I saw in a magazine, featuring Scarlett Johansson. She was half-dressed and dishevelled. It's not much. But it's the best I can do. I mention the fact that, in one picture, Johansson was shaving her legs in the kitchen sink. My friend purses his lips.

We move on to other attractive actresses and models. But I'm flagging. I'm out of practice. The women on the other table uncross their legs, steady themselves on their heels, and sashay out of the Starbucks. We watch their bottoms wiggling out of the door. My friend gives me his wolfish look again. I grin, not quite wolfishly. Not wolfishly enough. In some obscure way, I feel I've let him down.

Later, walking through the streets, I start thinking about the relationship between men and sexual fantasy. We all fantasise about sex, every day. Our hormones force us to. It's not our fault – we were made like this. It's an evolutionary fact. Ask Richard Dawkins. Men who think about sex all the time spread their seed, and pass on their characteristics to their sons, who, in turn, think about sex all the time, and spread their seed. And so on. It's slightly different for women. They can't spread their seed willy-nilly. They have to be a bit more careful.

On the way to the Tube station, I look at women. It's summer; they're not wearing much. Here's one. She looks gorgeous. A fantasy showreel plays in my head: a tryst, drinks, the meeting of eyes. She walks past. No, she's not quite right. Here's another. We are holding hands. Now we are kissing. Now … but no. Those shoes! The shoes are a deal-breaker. I realise that I've become much more picky in my fantasy life, now that I'm married, now that I have kids.

I also realise something else. Inside my respectable, married self, I do have an inner goat. It's just that I have spent a lot of time – several years – taming the goat. My inner goat exists inside a concrete pen, tethered to a post. The door to the pen is locked. But it wasn't always that way. When I was single, when I was on the prowl, it was a different story.

And now, as I walk the streets, I see what's happening. A woman walks past. If she's attractive, the goat rattles the door of its pen. Sometimes it butts the door; sometimes the door opens. I shove the goat back inside. Then I close the door, and delude myself that it never opened; that the goat never got out.

Over the next couple of weeks, I talk to several of my friends about the way we, as men, fantasise about women. I explain I'm writing an article. I explain the article will be anonymous. The first thing to report is how edgy some of the men are. I explain my position – that, when I was single, I fantasised about women all the time, but that I have almost perfected an override mechanism that enables me to kid myself I now don't. It's a form of deception, and also a form of self-deception.

Everybody agrees with me. Secrecy must be maintained. As men, there is always a level of deception. We all believe that, if our wives and girlfriends knew about the lechery that lurked within us, they'd be horrified. And this means that, in turn, our lechery sometimes horrifies us. It's a secret that might, at any time, backfire.

One man – I'll call him Clive – has a typical story. Clive is in his early forties. He is a corporate executive. He has a long-standing girlfriend. He thought she was fairly liberal. 'She's not a ball-breaking feminist,' says Clive. 'She laughs at risqué jokes. She's not even anti-porn. But one day, we were watching a movie, and I said I found Cameron Diaz attractive. Now, that doesn't sound like much, does it? "How attractive?" said my girlfriend. "Well," I said, "You know, attractive." I mentioned that if I wasn't married, and I met a woman like that, and we clicked, I might …'

Clive winces. 'She went insane. I had to take it back. I had to say I didn't mean it. But she didn't listen. She kept saying I was a liar and a sleaze. Our relationship wasn't right for weeks. And the thing is, she has no idea what I was really thinking. About what I'd really like to do to Cameron Diaz. Like, every day.'

As we talk, we agree about lots of things. The other men keep asking me to reveal nothing too personal about them. We agree that, at some point in each of our lives, we have all fantasised about having sex with lots of women, every day. Women at work, women in the street, women in magazines and on television.

We agree that this is something that often gets in the way of our lives. One guy, Ted, fortyish, who has a successful career in finance, says that you can be thinking about a work project, walking along the road thinking about how to get something done, and then – bang! You notice a woman. And there's something about that woman. Maybe it's the clothes. Usually it's a combination of things. Often you have no idea what it is. But you can't stop thinking about her – what it would be like to have sex with her.

'Not even that,' says Clive. 'What it would be like to be about to have sex with her.'

'Exactly,' says Ted. 'The moment she agrees to come back to your place. The way she looks at you when she says the words. That thing of getting into the taxi together. That's almost better than the sex.'

Alistair, an academic in early middle age, who always likes to couch things in intellectual terms, says, 'That is better than the sex. We all fantasise about getting off with women. But it's not all about sex. Maybe it was about sex when we were teenagers. But now we've had lots of sex. We know what sex is like. We know it would probably be good for a while, and then not so good. We've wised up. But what we all miss, as monogamous guys, is the feeling you get when you know you can pull. It's fantastic – it's a real boost. It's the thing that's missing from our lives.'

Ted says, 'They could have bars where the girls keep their clothes on, but tell you they want to have sex. You'd talk about it for a while. Then you would say, "No thanks, I'm married." And then you'd go home. That would be better than watching girls take their pants off and sticking their bottoms in your face.'

'But harder to arrange,' says Alistair.

'Lesbians,' says Ted. We all nod sagely. We all agree that we have, at one time or another, fantasised about lesbians. It's pretty much universal. Alistair explains: 'It's because we all grow up with the sense that our advances are unwanted. We all feel, at some point, that we, as men, want sex, and women, even if they tolerate it, don't want it as much. But lesbians – they are proof, living proof, that women want sex, that they like sex. They don't only want it under pressure from men.'

When guys fantasise about sex, we do it in incredibly complex ways. Some of us, like Marcus, use the fantasies as a form of bonding. I've had taxi drivers do this to me. You'll be driving past a leggy woman in a miniskirt, and the driver will say, 'I know what I'd like to do with that,' and look at you in the mirror, waiting for your reaction. But if that girl approached him, and asked him for sex, there and then, he'd probably be terrified. This is one of the best-guarded secrets men have – that they are, in fact, not always up for sex, even with beautiful women. They just want to think they are.

There are other things, too. I've mentioned the self-censorship that happens when you're married. You kid yourself you don't have a lecherous bone in your body – and you believe yourself, too. It's often hard to admit you still have an inner goat. But it's even harder to admit that, sometimes, you're not always fantasising about sex. Sometimes, your inner goat will insist that you mentally undress a woman as she walks past. But your inner censor wants her to keep her underwear on. Even in your most secret fantasies, some things need to be left to another realm of the imagination.

The truth is more nuanced than you might think. Men fantasise about sex all the time. They share their fantasies with other men, but it's often more about their relationships with each other than with women. They hide their fantasies from women – but they also sometimes hide their fantasies from themselves, too.

Another thing – and this is just a personal observation – men who have the wildest fantasies, and talk about them the most, are by no means the most likely men to be unfaithful. Sometimes, when a man is prepared to risk baring his masculine soul – and it is a risk – it's because he feels good about himself, and the relationship he's in. If I wanted to cheat on my wife, I'd certainly censor what I said to my friends about my sexual fantasies, and I'd probably perform a lot of self-censorship, too.

In the end, fantasising about sex is just what men do. Women do it too, of course. Now there's a can of worms.